In a country where a decent meal must have a nicely cooked portion of meat, monthly budgeting for food items for the salaried class is a constant struggle. People running families with just more than Rs50,000 a month complain of unseen expenses, that somehow eat up their incomes before the month ends and blame food items for that.

"The miscellaneous expenses which is largely spent on superstore as my wife brings in new stuff to try every month," says Irfan Azim, an MBA who works for a private pharmaceutical company in Karachi.

Azim’s household seems stuck between the oft-advertised ready-to-cook frozen food items, e.g., shami kebabs, sausages, and meat balls and the local butchers, who offer meat items for cheaper rates. "Since our daughter was born, my wife became very specific about hygiene and we try to stick to packed, standardised meat."

He gets chicken from the local retailers, since they do it fresh and also because the organic chicken is way too heavy on the pockets, "or else we would have gone for that," he adds. Since their daughter turned three, Azim’s wife started working to meet the burgeoning household expenses, though she mainly takes care of the larger schemes, e.g., saving, but helps during the end of the month. She works at an architectural firm and makes Rs40,000 a month. It has been six months.

"Luckily, I have a flat of my own or else the rent would have gobbled up half of my income," he says. The couple lives in Azim’s family house with his mother. Now they also plan dine-outs in fancy restaurants twice a month.

To maintain a middle-class lifestyle in Karachi -- often cited as the cheapest city in the world -- people, like in any other booming metropolitan, find paying rent for a house to be the most expensive part of monthly expense. And just below that comes the tuition fees of children, if the parents aspire to send their kids to private English medium schools.

But when it comes to foodstuff it is a constant expense with certain variations, as families like to experiment with new brands every month. But people generally agree that expenditure on food usually increases with an increase in income. If, for example, a family makes an extra 20,000 in any given month and all of it is spent. Most of it would go on eating. "It is the consumerist lifestyle. My wife goes to a renowned superstore in the city and if she has some extra cash she will spend it on chocolate and stuff, which is needless, but she does." says Azim.

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But again there are families that live on much less. For 35 year-old Owais Baloch, a security guard with an income of Rs15000, eating meat is a luxury. He has six family members, including his mother, wife and four children who live in a rented two-bedroom shack in an empty plot in Gulshan-e-Iqbal. Though his younger brother, who works in Saudi Arabia sends Rs10,000 to his mother, life for the family is strictly a hand-to-mouth affair. The rent takes Rs4000, including electricity and the water charges.

"Forget beef and mutton," says Baloch, "we manage to have chicken on the first two weeks of the months, when the salary is still in hand." His kids, the eldest one being 11 years old, go to a neighbourhood mosque to read the Holy Quran. He sometimes thinks of sending them to school but he can’t afford that. He accepted it as his fate and is not really worried.

"I must give credit to my wife and mother for running the house," says Baloch. For his family, having food means killing hunger that’s all. "At times, especially, by the end of the month, we live on hotchpotch. Rice and lentils with lemon juice topping. That’s our staple diet by the end of the month."

Baloch has no savings. Though he plans to start saving for his daughter, the youngest child. But that’s too early since she is four years old now. For the moment, he wants his eldest son to get a job. "He can get some work as a mechanic’s apprenticeship or go help a shopkeeper run a shop."

He expects the 11-year old to contribute at least Rs2000 in the house, to begin with. During Eid-ul-Azha, Baloch got a good amount of meat from the neighbourhood and they feasted on it for two weeks. Beef is around Rs400 per kg, while mutton can cost as high as Rs750 per kg, which Baloch rightly pointed out, is simply impossible to afford for someone with his monthly income.

It is evident that Baloch finds it difficult to manage his household expenses, but there are people living in the city who eke out a living in as low as Rs10,000. A peek into the daily affairs of their lives enlightens one on how to survive in the harshest of circumstances.

Akbar Ali is living with his three family members on a pavement across the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation (SIUT). A resident of Thar, he is living on the road for the past six months as his wife is being treated for a kidney ailment in the hospital. He has two small kids who loiter around the make-shift tent the whole day, while his wife remains inside the tent, tired of her sickness. She undergoes dialysis after every third day.

Ali makes about Rs6000 a month, doing odd jobs as a labourer and his brother sends Rs3000 from his village in Thar. They plan out their lives within Rs10, 000. But, interestingly, the family gets to eat more meat than that of Baloch’. They take their meals at Silyani Welfare Trust, a welfare organisation that feeds the underprivileged twice a day. "Mostly, it is lentils and bread, but we get meat, two to three times a week," says Ali, who works with a group of Pashtun labourers helping move household furniture. He says he can’t thank Silyani enough for the favour but insists that he does not beg. "I work hard for my family. Some times I am out of job but still I don’t sit idle."

For families from across various income groups, the essential foodstuff needed to survive another day is somehow procured. The amount of protein they manage to obtain naturally depends on their ability to spend. They toil hard to bring food to the table.

Some manage to chomp meat dipped in yummy sauce and some fight hunger with khichri. But in Pakistan, the virtue of giving alms and generally giving away food to, say, the household maid, who shows up every day, helps sustain families in many ways. One can witness the enormity of this exercise at places like Silyani Welfare, where those who work hard but don’t earn enough send their kids for a meal with a portion of meat.